Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday December 31, 2009 @01:30AM
from the hate-to-see-the-power-bill dept.

An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting:
"At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday December 18, 2009 @04:51AM
from the people-have-spoken dept.

Earlier this month, we discussed news that Sega's new Aliens vs. Predator video game had been refused classification in Australia, effectively banning it. After a scathing response from the developer saying they wouldn't censor the game, and later news that the classification scheme may be updated to include an R18+ rating, it now seems that the Classification Board has seen fit to give the game a green light after all. Sega's Darren Macbeth told Kotaku, "We are particularly proud that the game will be released in its original entirety, with no content altered or removed whatsoever. This is a big win for Australian gamers. We applaud the Classification Review Board on making a decision that clearly considers the context of the game, and is in line with the modern expectations of reasonable Australians."

grokSPY writes: Just days after announcing a $3 million settlement with the FTC, adware firm Zango is again facing scrutiny for shady installation practices. The company is now being linked to fake adult-themed YouTube videos floating around MySpace. According to Websense Security Labs, the videos come with an embedded installer that installs the ZangoCash ToolBar as part of a DRM (digital rights management) licensing agreement. MySpace users clicking on the videos, which closely resemble videos from the popular YouTube player, are directed to content at "yootube.info," a Web site hosted in the Netherlands. The registration information on the domain appears to be fraudulent.